Steve Gillmor, Dave Sifry, Scott Gatz on Tomorrow’s Syndication
Scott Gatz
Responsible for Yahoo!’s content syndication / RSS initiatives, Scott leads the team that redesigned My Yahoo! around RSS and integrated RSS into Yahoo! Mobile, Yahoo! News and the My Yahoo! Ticker. Gatz’s early career was diverse, ranging from television production at the Lifetime channel and NBC to product development and management for major information providers. In the early 1990’s, he spent two years managing a team at Reuters. Scott may be able to show us:
* How small changes can help big companies
* Where today’s emerging technologies might converge
* Why user friendliness is just as important as developer friendliness
Scott Gatz is wearing a tshirt that say “ONE HOT PIECE OF RSS”
Need to approach this with a broad perspective
consumer experience with yahoo is key
hope is that rss – we (people at this conference) can we take this tech and bring to mainstream
keeping it optimistic
millions of users using rss today
publishers, bloggers, can reach the audience right now
alot of people dont know rss or xml – and they shouldnt have to
how do we make it eash for these users
a lot of people doing more and more with rss than before
yahoo – working on media rss – photos, audio video – its beyond the post (blg post)
if you sub to flikr feed its presented like posts –
how do we make aggs that make content more sense?
how do we make tech that easy/convenient/integrated
where the user wants it
optimistic about consumers demadng the whowhatwhenwhere
where are the experiences where people are getting content?
playing in the living room as well as the desktop
no matter where – you can get your content
not in a reader – but in context
syndicated content alongside professionally produced content
dont limit me to one device/website/app
give it to me how i want
yahoo bought blo.gs
relays pings – moving ot the real time web
moment somehtign changes you can know about it
United States Geological survey has an rss feed
they ping – you can know when it is happening (so know you can get a message on your mobile phone letting you know your building isnt collapsing, there is an earthquake – big laugh from the crowd)
content (no matter what type) on what they want – however they want it
Dave Sifry (technorati)
bowled over by MS announcement
we are sitting on top of it – not consumers/producers
This is a sesmic shift (giggle from the crowd – re: earthquake)
fundamentally different way to look at the web and internet as a whole – moving from thinking of the worlds biggest library (we think in pages, documentss, directories)
There is no deep understanding of how new things come into play
Sifry believes it is all about user gen content this decade – as the tools have gotten easier for average people to create podcasts and blogs and content and easier to consume (MS commentary) regular folks can now get all this stuff – on their terms
We still think of the web like a library, but there is a humungous river/event stream/ of state changes at any given moment. We need to be able to tap in a track all that stuff
not just about being timely or uptodate or always-on, , but also understand the concept of time in relation to the web
what can be done when we go from the library model (tons of docs to find and read) to people having conversations over time
Sifry wants the web as realtime as IM
tip of the iceberg – symptomatic of some of the changes over 3-5 years
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how do we add more structure? metadata or microfromats (microformats.org)
how can we more effectively express this semistructure data format
whats a calendar even look like
what is you representation of ical as valid html – (hcal)
human oriented metadata formats, but KISS (Keep it Simple…)
just the start – thinking of the web as a realtime place
Steve Gilmore
Dare Abesanjo (the guy who created RSS Bandit and MS employee)- is one of his heroes – verbal and yet supportive of existing standards
no time to wait for any more stuff
get it working into our hands, get on with it
Steve then asks why Dare switched from Bloglines API to Newsgator “Dare – junking the useless proprietary synch standard from bloglines – will adopt another useless proprietary standard from newsgator”
Dare: To set a standard, you need to have other people follow it, newsgator and bloglines have no interest in listening/following Dare (which sux)
Sifry – gretest way for Yahoo to work is to take an open attitude – lets stand on each others shoulders and not on each others toes
Scott – we do what our users ask for
building a strong ecosystem of mobile (ubicomp anyone?) aggregation
help manage attention which is the 15 minute problem
DWiner – why are we selling another format? back end, interface – dave is nailing sifry, why cant yahoo operate a central service and store subs list ?
Yahoo guy – making it easy for mass consumption adoption, myyahoo – ind is built in
users need to be there
dwiner – why not do it before they do it – need someone with fin resources and central server and get operations
rsynch
SGilmore – when are we gonna agree to do someothing and what will it take
25 mil people will wake up one morning with a persisitent download – how do we reduce the pile to the info we are looking for? Out prob, ours to fix. (Steve is the main proponent of attention.xml and this was sorta his broadsides)
adam bosworth a month ago – conv didnt go well, pushed xml down gates throat- important guy, but right now is unable to make a committment (which was in private a long time) how to solve this problem – good reasons why major vendors dont want to play ball – think proporietary cloud of metadata is supervaluable and cant afford to share
Steve Gilmore – we will all rise together or fall seperately – every roach motel (where you check in, but closed standards wont let you back out) will be excluded from the larger pie in the future.